Rewilding the Imagination: Psychedelic Art, Ecological Medicine, and the Practice of Peace

In a world teetering between collapse and awakening, the most revolutionary act is to reimagine. To create. To remember. As a multi-modal digital artist working with the language of dreams, myth, memory, and media, I believe that art infused with psychedelic insight and ecological reverence is also a path to peace—not only inner calm, but deep relational harmony. When we rewild the imagination, we begin to reweave the threads of connection that lead us toward balance—with Earth, with community, and with the unseen.

Psychedelics and art have always shared a terrain: both are tools for perceiving the invisible, for decoding the symbols woven through the world. When the psychedelic experience reveals its patterns—fractal, interdependent, overflowing with light or shadow—it’s the artist who translates these revelations into forms that can be shared. This is no longer a niche pursuit. In an era defined by climate grief, social alienation, and technological overdrive, visionary art offers not escape, but return—a reconnection that seeds peace from within.

The Crisis Beneath the Crisis

We are living through a planetary emergency. Fires scorch ancient forests. Glaciers weep into rising seas. Entire species vanish without ceremony. These events are real, measurable, and devastating. But beneath the ecological crisis lies a deeper wound: a crisis of perception, of imagination, and of peace. For centuries, Western consciousness has privileged control over connection, domination over reciprocity. We have built machines but neglected dreams. We’ve built empires, but forget how to live together.

This disconnection from the living Earth is not simply environmental—it is spiritual and aesthetic. If we cannot feel the aliveness of the world, we will not act to protect it. And if we cannot imagine alternative ways of being, we remain locked in extractive patterns that lead to both ecological and interpersonal violence.

Psychedelics, when approached with reverence and care, rewire this perception. They do not simply alter consciousness; they restore its embeddedness in the more-than-human world. A tree becomes a companion. A bird becomes a messenger. A stranger becomes kin. From this perspective, peace is not just a political project—it is an ecological necessity, a recognition of interbeing.

Art as Ceremony

My own work as an artist has moved through photography, experimental film, soundscapes, digital layering, immersive projection, and augmented archives. But no matter the medium, the message remains: to make visible the invisible. I think of these pieces not as art objects but as offerings—ceremonial sites of encounter, moments of sacred pause.

Some of my earliest influences came from countercultural visionaries like Terence McKenna, who saw psychedelics not as drugs, but as communication tools—bridges between consciousness and cosmos. My film “Alien DreamTime” attempted to capture this sense of ecstatic communion—where spoken word, ambient music, and visual recursion formed a digital vine of awakening. Since then, my work has evolved into what some would call myco-media: art that behaves like mycelium—rhizomatic, regenerative, and rooted in place.

These works are not escapes from the world, but invitations back into it. Psychedelic art, at its best, is not about trippy surfaces—it is about soul-deep remembrance. It is about building the inner and outer conditions for peace to take root. It’s about making beauty that restores balance.

The Digital Dilemma

We live in a time when attention is monetized, when disinformation spreads faster than compassion, and when screen addiction replaces slow community. In this environment, art can either numb or nourish.

Digital art is not exempt from this dilemma. But it also holds enormous potential. Psychedelic media—when made with integrity—can turn digital space into sacred space. It can offer ceremony to those isolated, connection to those grieving, and beauty to those in despair.

To do this requires a shift in intention. We must resist the urge to chase trends or metrics. Instead, we must root our practice in care, in context, and in peace. A slow loop of breath over an ancient landscape. A whispered prayer encoded in pixels. A visual myth that reminds us of our own cycles. These are the gestures that heal the digital.

Rewilding the Self

To rewild the imagination is to rewild the self. To reclaim the felt sense of belonging to Earth. Psychedelics facilitate this process not by giving us new ideas, but by removing what blocks us from truth. They allow us to grieve the damage. They open the heart to awe. They reveal that peace is not a final state—it is a practice of constant listening.

In my journey as an artist, I have returned again and again to silence. To stillness. To the pause between images. I’ve found that what matters is not how loud or clever the work is—but whether it allows people to feel again. To breathe again. To imagine again.

I have stood in with medicine teachers from jungles and deserts and sat in downtown apartments with tech-savvy mystics. The setting changes, but the hunger is the same: people want to feel whole. Art that arises from the psychedelic experience offers not escape from reality, but a path back into it—with more tenderness, more humility, and more peace.

Art in the Anthropocene

As we face what scientists call the Anthropocene—an age of human-caused extinction and dislocation—we might as well ask: how to return to the Imaginal wildness of nature- as a fractalized meaning mirror. If Reality is real, beauty, mystery, joy, are also realm.

I sorta believe our role is sacred. We are not here to decorate the apocalypse. We are here to shape the dreams that will replace it.

To do this, we must make art that speaks in many languages—biological, ancestral, technological, mythological. We must serve not just human audiences, but forests, rivers, fungi, and future generations. Our art must reflect the truth of grief and the possibility of grace.

Peace is not absence of conflict. It is the capacity to hold tension in creative balance. To make art in the Anthropocene is to become a peaceworker of the soul—one who composts despair into vision.

Eldership and Emergence

At 71, I no longer seek attention. I seek resonance. I want to leave something useful. I believe the psychedelic community, and society more broadly, must begin to honor creative elders—not as gurus or authorities, but as cultural gardeners. We have failed, we have risen, we have returned. And in that spiral, we carry medicine.

What if our society treated elder artists as peacekeepers? As witnesses? As storytellers who hold the memory of cycles past?

What if younger artists and technologists collaborated with older visionaries—not to copy us, but to learn how to slow down, listen, and walk with care?

These are not utopian dreams. I have already seen them forming—in intergenerational collectives, in decolonial art spaces, in shared psychedelic ceremonies.

Dancing into portals collective tonic. There is a hyper-connected culture emerging, one rooted an ecology of souls. Not in conquest, but in caring, sharing food, unpredictable pleasures.

We are after all, a tender carnivore. 

Peaceful Re-Enchantment

The Earth does not need our guilt. It needs our love. It needs our courage. It needs our art.

Above all, it needs our peaceful attention—our willingness to sit with complexity and still choose life. Psychedelic art, when grounded in truth and spirit, can become a map for this return.

Let’s tell some stories that have been buried. Let us imagine new ways of loving each other and tasting wind spirits on high ground. and al and the more-than-human. Let us grieve, create, and reweave the social and spiritual fabric.

We are not separate. We never were.

Rewild the imagination.

We might as well give peace a dance, a rhythm, a ritual, a way of making art that remembers.

And welcomes the anomalous.

Featured image: Other Realms Museum – Mandalas